Repeating Patterns
Johnny looks at a picture of his turquoise Fender guitar and sighs. He tried to make a career in music but failed; cheap ramen every night for a year pushed him over the edge. He’d go work at his father’s company after all. Maybe it was his destiny. Music wasn’t meant to be. And his Fender was stolen.
In Los Angeles, everyone’s a guitar player, an actor, a model. Johnny, turning thirty tomorrow, no longer has the stomach for suffering. Auditions for bands turned him off. He was surprised how many groups were going for looks instead of concentrating on their sound. Being a devotee of Van Halen and Clapton, the sound was all that mattered. When he plugged in and warmed up with blues riffs, he was met with blank stares. “Can you play Metallica?” they’d say. And, “Why’d you cut your hair?”
The job offer was always on the table. Stock trading in Iowa. “It’s about numbers. Just like music,” his father mentioned more than once. And Johnny was always a numbers guy. That partly accounted for his fascination with music. The repeating patterns and scales shared theories with higher mathematics. He could see the charts in front of his eyes. While others struggled with key changes and notation, it all came naturally to him. He had no doubt he’d excel at stocks. If he could keep boredom at bay.
The suit doesn’t really fit, and if he looks hard enough, there’s a stain on his tie. Also, are Doc Martens office appropriate? It doesn’t matter. It’s his dad’s company. Who’s going to say anything? Johnny, dressed up and ready for his first day, sits at the kitchen table sipping coffee and looking at his iPad. The old man is in Panama for a business vacation. He’s flying back today to welcome Johnny into the fold and to take him to Blue/Green, a top-of-the-line foodie restaurant with a Norwegian chef and an adjacent Third Wave coffee shop.
Johnny checks flight times and weather while he enjoys coffee. Normally, he never worries about his dad, but there’s hurricane alerts for the coast of Colombia, and the severity of the storm changes by the minute. Two hours ago he received a text saying the Nicaraguan cigars and Guatemalan coffee he’s bringing home are particularly wonderful. Johnny wonders if he’ll ever taste either of those things. He remembers one trip where his dad’s flight was redirected over the Bermuda Triangle because of a tsunami off the coast of Cuba. On the call from Miami, Johnny asked him if the cigars were worth dying for. “Son, they’ll taste even better now.”
He stands up and checks his suit in a full length mirror. Today he’s a new man with a new life. As the coffee kicks in, so does his confidence. Studying market reports and making trades is like learning new songs. As his dad told him one time, “Let’s turn it up to eleven and get to work!”
